You know Europe is a democracy right? And that you could just pass laws in the individual countries?

I am impressed somebody figured out what I was talking about though. They of course use the mod point to mod me down but I'm surprised it didn't go over their heads.

We have trillionaires now. Money has lost all meaning to the Epstein class.

AI how's the potential to free the ruling class from the peasantry once and for all. A World of machines doing all the work and the thinking for them. It's the ultimate answer to the question "but who's going to buy their products?".

I don't think folks know history enough. For thousands of years the elite and the ruling class were just born into it. Literally anointed by God. This thing where the elite and your rulers are a merchant class that have to cater to your needs to some extent and need to employ you in jobs is a very new invention. Within the last 3 or 400 years of human history.

I think the problem is to change that's coming is just too big for our brains. They are set up to run down antelope on the Savannah not to deal with a handful of ultra powerful people monopolizing all human resources and driving us all into limitless poverty while periodically using drones to bomb us back into the Stone age so we never challenge their authority.

But as always you, yes you dear reader, will somehow escape this fate because you are personally and absolutely essential to the Epstein class. You cannot be replaced and they will always be completely dependent on you.

That's another trick of human cognition. You can't really face just how bad things can get and get out of bed every morning...

Not being much of a gamer I haven't followed this story (at all!) so the headline and initiative name "Stop Killing Games" made me think it was 1.3 million signatures from people who want to ban games in which people are killed. "No way that's going to pass," I thought. People love virtual murder.

Then I figured out that it's the killing of the games people want to stop, not the games that include killing.

Vaguely related, I had a serious EverQuest addiction ~20 years ago (the reason I gave up on any but the most casual of gaming), and I noticed a few weeks back that it's still available on Steam, and free to play, so I downloaded it and logged on, and even found my old character still there (though with zero gear because I gave it all away when I quit playing). The UI is dramatically different, but the general content seems the same. It's no longer very interesting to me, though.

The pre-installed apps are just as unremovable on Moto as any other (unless you unlock the bootloader; some Motos have unlockable bootloaders). It may be that you define their pre-installed apps as not crapware, but that's a judgement call, not a statement of technical fact.

Yes, that was the joke. Maybe too much of an inside joke, but isn't this supposed to be a nerd forum?

Sex phone operator for robots. One of his biggest customers is a mister B Rodriguez.

Thanks glad I'm not the only one who noticed the obsession with work and the idea of that he has absolutely no self-worth let alone societal worth if he can't hold a full-time job...

For ethics in games journalism.

You forgot third: He delivers results often enough to keep the believers believing. Tesla really is an electric car company that builds actual cars. SpaceX is actually flying rockets, and has achieved reusability, opening the door for dramatically cheaper space access.

Little of that is his own genius, but he does seem to have a knack for getting actually smart people working on visionary stuff.

Disable, yes. Uninstall, no. If it's pre-installed it's part of the system image, which is mounted read-only and protected with fs-crypt. Actually modifying that would require root access to remount it rw and to disable fs-crypt.

That would also, of course, completely destroy the Android security architecture, leaving you wide open to all sorts of attacks. If you want to do that, get an Android device that has an unlockable bootloader (e.g. Google Pixel), unlock it, then do whatever you like. And be sure not to hire any evil maids.

I'd recommend ML-KEM and ML-DSA instead.

I also use the Claude Code extension with VS Code. The inline diffs it provides are quite clumsy compared to Cursor's.

It's got a butt ugly design, it's roundy, transparent, plasticy, has the commodore logo on it, primitive, and it's got a SIM card.

You know what that means? It's still fully trackable, it will give you false feelings of safety, a phone without the bloat for sure, and maybe it's best as a 30$ Nokia simple-phone (yes they sell those), but this is a 500$ simple phone in disguise, and with a design that is so ugly that I can't even see it sell to people like me who actually used and coded Demoscene stuff back in the 80s.

Dude hipsters don't exist anymore. The kind of young hip dude or dudette that would qualify as a hipster is so thoroughly beaten down these days they've just faded into nothing. They're busy putting 60 hours a week in at Uber for just enough gas money to do it another week.

The core market for this is neurodivergent people who are being actively harmed by.. I don't want to call it social media because it's not. We need a new word to describe the kind of nastiness that Twitter and Facebook do where they actively keep you in a state of panic and fear and misery for the purposes of engagement so they can serve up advertisements and slurp up your data.

It's like how we tend to call right-wing extremists "conservative". When somebody's going to do something really awful they make sure that they pick a word to describe it or a phrase to describe it that is the exact opposite of what they're actually doing. Otherwise they couldn't get away with it because well, it's like you wouldn't buy a bouquet of dog shit would you?

It's not the approach that substandard it's the quality of the phone. It's a $500 device that you can buy the equivalent without the blockages for about 150 bucks.

I mentioned Twitter and Facebook has the kind of places that someone who is having trouble with doomscrolling wants to avoid and therefore wants a device that refuses to install those apps. That's presumably the selling point here you can't install the kind of apps that you would use to Doom scroll with. You're not searching Twitter you're wasting time on it while it makes you angrier and angrier and more frightened and more upset. You're not enjoying yourself but you can't stop because the algorithm has trapped you and you know this and you know you ought to just uninstall the app but you find yourself uninstalling it and then going back to it for another hit off the pipe.

The point is that sites like Twitter and Facebook use complex algorithms to take advantage of people with a variety of problems. It would be one thing if they were offering them something positive and good but all they give a shit about is the next engagement and the next opportunity to serve up and advertisement or the slurp up some data they can resell. They are more than happy to help you feel horrified and miserable as long as you're generating revenue for them in some capacity.

There's a bunch of neurodivergent people out there who know that they're being manipulated and they would be interested in a device like this because it makes it harder for them to fall off the wagon and reinstall the app. But the app shouldn't be allowed to be that addictive and destructive in the first place.

It's literally one group of ghouls profiting off of people's misery and another group of ghouls selling a potential solution to the first group. That's what sucks. And that's why it's peak capitalism